


origin stories

by foxbones



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, dark gritty superhero shit, superhero au, you can save the world but you can't save yourself
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-19 23:03:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 20,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7381021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxbones/pseuds/foxbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>emma is a vigilante with super powers. regina is a district attorney with (secret) super powers. theirs is a darker, grittier superhero story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i. aurum

 

 

 

 

 _I multiplied myself to feel myself,_  
To feel myself I had to feel everything,  
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,  
I undressed, I yielded,  
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.  
-Fernando Passoa

 

 

 

 

“Hey kid, you like superheroes?”

Emma shakes her head. Except Emma’s not her name, at least not here -- it’s kid or runt or c’mere girl.

“Sure you do,” he says, adjusting his ballcap. He pulls her over, points up into the sky. “Everybody likes superheroes. You wanna see one? You look right up here, just like that.”

There’s a glint, like the sun hitting metal, but it’s small and it’s moving so fast. It can’t really be a person, can it? It can’t really be--

“Snowstorm, by the looks of her. Shoots ice arrows out of her hands or somethin’. Can’t remember.” He yanks hard Emma into his side, clamping onto her shoulder. When she squirms, he pulls her up onto the arm of his lawnchair. “Whaddaya think? You can see ‘em fly around all day from up here on the roof. You sit right here with me and we’ll watch some superheroes. Sit real still now.”

But Emma fidgets and pulls and when she’s out of his grip, she runs towards the stairwell, slams the door behind her. Slams it on the sun, and on the man who lives with her foster mom, and slams it on those superheroes, too.

 

 

 

 

This is what Emma knows about her birth: 

She was found under the interstate, wrapped in a blanket stolen from a hospital. Her umbilical cord looked like it had been burnt, or frozen black. 

There was no note.

So Emma grows up under the care of the state, always just one step or two below comfortable, dreaming her child dreams of oceans and wide open impossible spaces from the backseats of rusting sedans and bottom bunks and for a good deal of time, the roof of her building. Until Donna gets a boyfriend, and then Ed’s always there, always trying to get her to sit on his lap and go for rides with him, and Emma can’t wait until she’s big enough to punch him in the face.

Big enough for her own room, big enough for new shoes that didn’t belong to the neighbor kid upstairs, big enough for her fists to land hard enough to hurt a grown man.

Big enough to know how it is a man can fly.

 

 

 

 

This is what else Emma knows:

Under her bunk, tucked towards the wall where no one will make a grab for it, there’s a shoebox full of newspaper clippings.

_The High-Flying Heroics of White Prince!_

_Snowstorm Saves Family of 6 From The Sorceress’s Grip_

_Snowstorm and White Prince Named Supers of the Year_

_The Sorceress Returns: Do We Have Anything to Fear? Mayor Urges City to Trust in Our Heroes!_

_Snowstorm and The Sorceress Locked In Epic Battle Above City Heights!_

Because on Emma’s eighth birthday, there’s an angel in her window. Dressed all in white, her hands making icy flowers on the glass. She falls onto the ledge from nowhere, graceful and silent, looks into the bedroom where Emma stares back, mouth open. The angel smiles, and then she disappears, flies right up into the air.

A few weeks later, Donna’s drinking and Ed’s got the paper out and Emma can’t hold in her surprise, has to grab it right out of his hands and make a run for it before he swats her in the back of the head.

Her angel has a name. Her angel’s name is Snowstorm.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s ten and sneaks onto the trolley downtown to see Snowstorm and White Prince flying around the new skyscraper, smiling and waving while the mayor makes his speech. 

Emma’s eleven and lifts a magazine from the corner bodega to keep the foldout Snowstorm and White Prince poster. When Ed falls asleep in front of the television, she puts in her worn VHS tape, a recorded special on the rivalry with their arch nemesis, The Sorceress. Emma flexes her fingers in front of the blue light, spreads them as wide as she can to match Snowstorm’s hand on the screen.

Emma’s twelve and ties a towel around her foster brother’s shoulders. He’s small for his age, too tiny for six, and he stares up at her with his hands on his hips, grinning at his hero. “I can really do _anything_?” he asks, and she smiles, musses his hair. 

Emma’s thirteen and nothing supernatural comes out of her hands when the neighbor boy corners her on the basketball court. No one lifts her out of the street and into the air when she walks home with a torn shirt. And when the neighbor comes banging on the door, her son’s eyes swollen shut, his shoulder dislocated, there is no hiding place for Emma, no secret cave or hidden fortress. There’s only the space under her bed that she doesn’t fit into anymore, her limbs grown out around her, and someone screaming at her, yanking her back out by her hair.

Emma’s fourteen and The Sorceress has gone into hiding. Snowstorm cuts the tape at the opening of a mall, a meager crowd clapping half-heartedly. Ed smacks her in the head when he walks by, tells her to pick up his empties, throws one across the room when she ignores him. Emma turns off the television.

Emma’s fifteen and the White Prince action figure is on clearance at the drugstore. She stares at the pile of identical boxes as she waits in line, doesn’t blink when the girl scans her cough medicine, doesn’t ask for her ID. She drops the bag on Donna’s bed when she gets home. The television blares with the rise in crime, the dropping values in city property. Emma stands in the kitchen, watches the camera zooming in on the downtown riots, on the broken glass of corporate windows and the bodies spilling inside like water breaking through a dam.

Emma’s sixteen and the old guys in the park who sneak her cigarettes are talking about superheroes. “What gives ‘em the right, you know? I didn’t ask you to save the city from some other sociopath, right? Bigger problems than some bitch in a black cape these days. Show me a superhero that can give my son a job and stop my brother’s business from going under. These supers, they say they’re saving the city but they ain’t out there stopping homelessness, y’know?” And she nods at these remarks, takes her cigarette, and waves. Kicks a few cans on the way home. They’re right, after all, and everyone knows it.

 

 

 

 

“Your school called today.” This from Donna when she’s trying to silently close the door behind her. “They said you don’t show up anymore.”

Shit.

“You know that comes down on me, right? You’re a minor, they’re gonna fucking nail my ass for not keeping track of you. I’m not gonna stand for this shit anymore, you had better get--”

It’s January, and the fire escape is freezing on her hands, her skin sticking and unsticking painfully. She sees her breath with each step up the rung, doesn’t stop until she reaches the roof. 

The stars. Even with the light pollution, she can see the stars. They’re dim, but they’re there, and no one can take them from her. Not even the door opening behind her, and the man who it bears. Not Ed, sliding up behind her, an arm around her front.

“Don’t let the bitch get to you,” he says, and she keeps focusing on the stars, the stars, the stars. “I’ll be nice to you.”

And when she slams her head back, knocks him over with a bewildered hand to his bleeding nose --

“You fucking bitch. You fucking tease-ass _bitch_.” 

She’s ready for him. He gets to his feet, smears his bleeding nose across his face with the back of his hand. It happens so slowly and then all at once: every flake of snow discernible as it passes in front of his furious red face, and he’s moving towards her, he’s got her backed up against the edge of the building and they’re sixteen stories up and she hates him, she hates him more than she’s ever hated anything, so when he grabs for her, when he swings that arm, she shoves.

Emma’s hands go right through his chest cavity. She blinks, unable to comprehend the warm, bleeding mass snug around her wrists, the fists she’s making on the other side of his organs, the spine white between them. Ed looks down, and then at Emma, his face a mixture of fear and confusion. 

And then she backs away, terrified, as Ed, seeping twin holes in his middle, teeters against the edge, gasps, and falls over the other side.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s seventeen and sleeps behind the dumpster, just like she’s seen the others do. While they fear for their safety, restless teenagers sometimes appearing in the alley to mess with them, to record themselves handing over greasy bags of fast food, Emma’s fears are an entirely different thing. She can handle the shitty teenager with the smartphone and steeltoed boots. What she can’t handle is the day someone remembers who she is.

She’s attempting to forget herself, in case it helps.

Someone’s nudging her awake, and then there’s a light in her face, an iPhone.

“Fuck _yes_ ,” a young male voice, a kid. “It’s her. C’mere bro, bring the camera around.”

Another light in her face, a video camera. “You sure? Doesn’t look like anything special to me.”

“I’m sure.” A teenage boy is bending down in front of her, lifting her chin with the end of a baseball bat. “It’s the one from the videos. Wait until you see this shit - this bitch can’t die.”

Another boy, standing behind the other two, drops a duffel bag that clangs and rings and she knows what will come out of it: a wrench, a few bats, a crowbar sometimes. If she holds back, she can take enough to not hurt them back, at least not enough that they’ll end up in the ER, or running off to the police. She can take the wrench to the face, the crowbar to the back. At the worst, if it’s the biggest one hitting her, it might knock her to her knees for a second, but that’s nothing. She can take it all.

“Get the camera up here,” the first boy says, tipping back his cap and grinning out the side of his mouth. He picks up a wrench, tosses two hundred bills onto Emma’s sleeping bag. “You wanna be famous?” he asks, and swings the wrench back.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s nineteen and pulling her hat down, trying to hide her face so the cops won’t drag her out again, try to hustle her off to the same shelter she just escaped. There’s two of them outside the convenience store, one of them crouched down to talk to old Fanny in her sleeping bag. Emma turns away when he looks up, pretends to examine the magazines until she sees them give up and walk on, off to do whatever it is shitty cops do with their evenings. She counts her quarters and tries to figure out if she has enough for a candy bar, hopes the man in line in front of her will hurry up so she can get out of there. She’d take off now, but she’s hungry as hell.

“Whoa, hey,” the cashier’s saying, a fear in his voice that Emma’s all too familiar with, and she looks up to see the man in front of her has a gun out. 

“Everything you’ve got in the register,” he says, but he’s shaking, and his jacket’s worn and the shirt underneath is dirty and it’s no secret that the city’s falling apart and people are desperate, scared shitless about getting by. 

“Hey,” she says, touches his shoulder. “Look, man, you don’t have to do this.”

But he turns in place, and meets her eye with his own terrified expression, gun twitching. It fires.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he moans, drops the gun. “I didn’t, I didn’t mean--”

The bullet has gone right through her stomach and out the other side, clean, lodged itself in the wallrack of titty magazines behind her. Of course she only knows this by looking down and seeing the wound, since she doesn’t feel a thing.

“What the hell,” the cashier says, and it’s probably because the skin under the hole in her shirt has just rearranged itself, reverting to a smooth and unblemished exterior. The man who shot her is staring, too, and he grabs for the gun on the ground, backs up into the counter.

“You some kind of super?” he’s saying, and she knows it’s a threat. It’s enough for her to reach out and show that there’s nothing in her hands, shake her head.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “It’s okay. Just drop the gun, man. Drop it and walk out of here alive, okay?”

“So you’re immortal or something?” His eyes are wide and he’s looking at her with terror, she terrifies him. It makes her stomach sink. “You can’t die?”

“No idea, not really a priority to find out.” She reaches out, slowly wraps her hand around the gun. He fires again, and she swears, pulls her hand away so that the tear in her finger and hole in her palm can have a second to close up.

“What the hell,” the cashier says again, peering over the edge of the counter. 

“You do it,” the man says, nodding towards the register. “You won’t get slowed down by the cops, right? You open it up and take the money.” He lifts the gun so it’s now aiming for her head.

She’s never actually taken a bullet to the head before.

“Look,” she starts, aware that her hands are both still up in the air and one of them recently recovered, and thus not as strong. “You put that gun down and you walk to the door, and you can get out of here. We’re not going to stop you.”

The man’s eyes narrow, and he smiles a little at her. “I’ll give you half.”

She never knew that even in the face of death, you could still feel your stomach churn in hunger. And that’s how Emma ends up working with Killian.

 

 

 

 

“What the hell else have you got up those sleeves?”

This is after a casing goes wrong, and Emma puts her fingers through a security guard’s forearm, like a knife through butter. Killian sees it happen, balks and drops his stash and goes outside to puke before they need to run, and fast.

“I don’t like doing that,” she says, and hours later, she’s still shaking just thinking about it. It seemed to take forever to clean the blood and viscera and whatever else it was, melted bone and she doesn’t want to think about it, from her hands and shirtsleeve.

“Well, it’s insane, whatever it is. You can’t get hurt, you don’t feel pain--”

“I feel pain,” she says. “Just not all of it. And I do get hurt, it’s just that I’m healing quickly.”

He gives her a look.

“Fine, really fucking quickly. I don’t know.” She flexes her hand, examines her fingers like they aren’t attached to her body. “The other thing, the body melting thing. I don’t do that...not on purpose. I don’t know how it works.”

“So it could happen out of the blue? You could be touching someone, and suddenly you’ve made a hole in them.”

She shrugs. “I guess.”

He laughs. “Don’t ever give me a handjob.”

“Fuck off.” She gets to her feet, pulls on her jacket. The bare room they’re renting doesn’t have heating all the time, just two mattresses and a hot plate and whatever they’ve gotten their hands on lately.

Later she’s trying to sleep and something’s waking her up, the mattress shifting and a new spring in her side.

“Hey,” he says, and there’s a cold mouth on her neck, an arm around her chest. “It’s okay. You owe me, right? That’s all it is, just a favor.”

She doesn’t even think. She slams the back of her head into him, shoves him into the ground with a knee. 

She takes everything and leaves. She does leave him the hot plate, like some thrown out consolation prize. It was only ever temporary anyway.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s twenty three and she works two jobs to afford membership at a dojo. Finds girls with sweet lips and a tendency towards lost things to crash on their couches or in their beds. In between, she finds a storage room in the dojo where she can sleep if she needs it. Loses track of the days, one sweaty punch after another, nothing mattering but her ability to contact fist with flesh, until she realizes the days have been years.

This week’s name is Jasmine, and Emma sits on the edge of her bathtub, letting the other girl shave her head. The clumps fall into her lap, across her open palms, and she lets them stay there.

Last week, they gave each other India ink tattoos. Jasmine’s is a water lily, just down the side of her calf. Emma’s was a lion, until it faded into her skin a few minutes later. She stares at the blankness of her forearm, now dusted in fine blonde hairs.

She stops remembering Ed’s face before he fell over the edge into the dark. She forgets that her hands do anything but block her partner’s punches. She forgets that a bullet can’t leave a hole in her flesh. There are no bullets in this life she’s making for herself, this quiet life of habit and grateful exhaustion.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s twenty seven and sitting on the uptown train. Public transit’s worse than ever, dirty and broken down, never on time. Somebody a few seats down is sitting in their own vomit. A man in the corner keeps making eye contact with her, smiling like a dog. Her knuckles tighten on her knee. 

A transit cop gets on at the stop, stands next to the door. The man in the corner finally takes his eyes off Emma and focuses on the cop now, studying him. Emma sees him dig his hand into his coat when the cop’s not looking, and she stiffens.

“Hey pig,” the man says, getting to his feet. There’s a bowie knife in his hand, long and deadly.

The cop doesn’t react fast enough, but Emma does. She’s up already, slipping between them. The knife comes down just between her sternum and top rib, buried to the hilt. Someone screams, another passenger starts banging on the compartment behind them, yelling for help. The man’s looking at her, still smiling when he steps back and the cop nails him to the ground, another passenger reaching out as if to catch her.

But she doesn’t need catching. She calmly draws the knife out, wincing slightly as it audibly grates against her bones. She stares at it in her hand, gleaming with her own blood, and then sets it onto the seat next to her.

At the next stop, the police rush the car, pulling out the man with his head bearing the imprint of a kneecap, and someone’s got her by the arm, too, leading her into the station.

“Is this her?” A man in a suit is asking the cop from the train, and he nods quickly, gestures at his own collarbone. The man escorts her up the stairs, into the afternoon light of a strangely quiet street. When she realizes that their feet are no longer touching the ground, it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

Emma’s twenty seven and sitting in the penthouse suite of the Mills Corporation, in the tallest skyscraper in the city. She’s seated in a chair that probably costs more than any money she’s ever seen in her life, in some high-ceilinged office of some high-minded executive. It’s dramatic, almost laughably so, all black marble and gold accents and she has no idea what someone like her is supposed to be doing in a place like this. She doesn’t know much about the Mills Corporation, except that their building towers over the skyline, and they deal in finance. But finance is not something Emma Swan has ever known, or needed to know.

She certainly doesn’t know what’s about to seat itself across from her, but she probably doesn’t expect the older woman who appears, smiling in a way that Emma doesn’t quite understand. Her dark hair is pulled back into a severe bun, but her makeup is bright, her lips so red that they remind Emma of something she could eat. She pretends her stomach isn’t empty.

“I’m Cora Mills,” the woman says, taking her seat at the massive marble-topped desk. She smooths the front of her impeccable black dress, which did not need smoothing. “What is your name, dear?”

“Emma,” she says, shrugging, suddenly too cold. “Emma Swan.”

“Do you mind if I try something? Just place your hand on my desk there, be a good girl.”

Emma stares at her, and then the desk the woman is gesturing to with a manicured hand. “Sorry?”

“It’ll be over in just a second, darling. Simply a formality.”

Emma takes a deep breath, leans forward. The woman runs her fingers across the back of Emma’s hand, narrows her eyes.

“Palm up, dear.”

Emma flips her hand, and there’s a long smooth blade in the woman’s hands, seemingly out of thin air, coming down into the middle of Emma’s palm.

Emma forces herself to flinch, to pretend to be in pain, but the woman tuts and shakes her head, smiling. “No need for that here,” she says, and then pulls the blade up. When she closes her hand, it’s gone, nothing but a faint haze between her fingers. 

The wound on Emma’s palm has healed itself already, damning in its blankness.

“This has been extremely helpful, thank you.” The woman continues to smile at her, this time seemingly in approval. “Swan -- is that a family name?”

“I don’t know.” Emma says, pulling her hand back onto her lap. “Never met them.”

“Interesting,” Cora says. “Humble beginnings are always befitting of an origin story.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but what am I doing here?”

The woman shifts in her seat, still smiling that knowing, strange smile. 

“Are you aware of the Mills Foundation, Emma? In addition to running a global corporation, my family has always donated generously to research in the name of anomalies in our species.” She fixes Emma with a stare. “Very particular anomalies.” 

“Supers,” Emma says, and her memories flood with Snowstorm and White Prince, scaling skyscrapers and carrying entire subway cars on their shoulders.

“I suppose, if that’s what they’re calling it these days,” Cora says, eyes narrowing. “We’re less enamored by the capes and spandex suits, though. Far more fascinating is what lies beneath. Pushing the limits of what we know to be human capabilities, the world bearing witness to a new kind of evolution. That is where the Mills Foundation takes an interest.”

Emma stares at her own hands, and then back into the face of this woman. Emma knows she does not fear her. “You think I’m a super.”

Cora laughs, the curt and professional lilt of a woman far above Emma’s standing. “On the contrary, dear, I know that’s what you are.”

“Do you know why? Why I’m...like this?”

“Oh, yes.” The woman’s eyes shine with pride. “We’re on the verge, according to our scientists. We can expect definitive results within the year.”

Something in Emma breaks, like a band finally, blissfully snapping. Hope streaming through the clouds. “So you can take it away. You can get rid of it.”

The woman stares at Emma, blinking. “I’m sorry, dear?”

“You can get rid of it. Whatever it is that makes me like this. If you know where it comes from, then you can take it away. You can make me normal.”

Cora’s eyes narrow. “And why would we ever do that, dear?” She reaches out, takes Emma’s hand, her thumb tracing Emma’s knuckles, knuckles that can never be bruised, or broken. “What you have is a gift, a rare and beautiful honor. Surely you’re not ungrateful, Emma.”

Emma stares at her hands. “No,” she says simply. She’s desperate for a way out now, though she doesn’t know why. “I can’t fly. I know the supers can fly, but I--”

“Not a requirement, actually. There are many more nuanced cases than just the ones we see in the news.” She’s looking Emma over again, searching for something. “I’d be curious to see your nuances, in fact. Is rapid cell regrowth your only trait?”

Her hands, pale and bare now, once covered in blood and tissue and marrow.

“Yes,” Emma says. “That’s it.”

“As far as you know, of course.” That smile. “Well, the tests will turn up anything else, even if they haven’t presented themselves yet.”

“What tests?”

“Oh, hardly anything to worry about.”

A hand is now resting on Emma’s shoulder, another man in a suit, this one built wider, his palm like a brick on her spine. 

“Don’t worry, Emma,” Cora Mills says, pulling a file from her desk. “We’ll take care of you.”

 

 

 

 

And the tests, or what she will come to remember of the tests:

Excruciating pain.

Processes it only in waves as the needles are inserted, the drips started, and sensation after sensation seems to bend her body in half. 

But she is not moving. She cannot move.

She is strapped to the table, watching the figures in smocks and masks working around her, recording things, touching her arms, her legs, telling her she’s doing well.

At one point, she knows she saw someone else.

She knows that when she looked up, finally returning to consciousness for a brief painless minute, she saw an observation window above her, and a woman standing at it. A brunette, maybe her own age, maybe older. Her expression strained. She makes eye contact with Emma, bites down on her bottom lip, turns away. 

And then someone is sticking something else into Emma, telling her she’s being very good, and the pain returns, the unbelievable, blinding pain.

 

 

 

 

When she wakes, her mouth is parched. She runs her tongue over cracked, raw lips, tries to take a deep breath. The light seems too bright.

But when her eyes adjust, it is Cora Mills sitting beside her in her impeccable outfit, smiling the same smile as when she had left Emma in the surgery.

“Well done, Emma.” There is a file in her lap, large and full. “The worst is over, and you’ve performed splendidly.”

She cannot feel her limbs yet. “My legs--”

“Sensation will return in time. The body must recover, even bodies as remarkable as yours.” Cora continues to smirk. “Your results, by the way, were spectacular. I don’t mean to fill your head with notions of grandeur, but you may be the most impressive specimen we’ve been able to record.”

“What does that mean?”

Cora leans forward, as if sharing a secret. “It means you are very powerful, Emma. More importantly, it means you have a great potential for even greater power.”

But the memory of pain is still real in Emma’s mind, and she cannot look at the smiling woman without thinking of that recent white hot agony. “But you can get rid of it.”

“Oh, dear.” Cora shakes her head. “Please don’t start this talk again, Emma. I want to believe you are not as foolish as that.”

Emma attempts to get up on her elbows, struggling upright despite the protests of a nurse who has suddenly appeared, pressing her back down. The woman’s attempts are in vain against Emma, though, who pushes her into the wall with the brush of a few fingers, swings her legs over the side of the table and drops to her feet.

“I’m leaving,” she says, aware she is wearing nothing but a gown. Cora looks up at her, still smirking. 

“You won’t get very far, Emma. You’ll need to recover, and the best place for that is right here. This facility is--”

Remembering her days of getting out of the hands of cops, she tries another tactic. “Am I free to go?”

“No,” Cora says, throwing off Emma’s plan. “You are not.”

The nurse has gotten to her feet, and there’s something sharp in Emma’s neck. “But,” Emma starts, and then cannot finish.

As the world goes black around her, she remembers, for no apparent reason, the sound of the crowd when Snowstorm had flown over them, the single joyous note of their cheers.

 

 

 

 


	2. ii. argentum

 

 

 

 

Regina is four and isn’t allowed to run in the house.

“Again, Regina.”

But Regina is too young and already too old, still not old enough for her feet to reach the floor when she sits in the chair in her mother’s study, but never again so young that she can pretend to not know about the black suit in the other room, displayed behind a hidden panel. A suit with a blood red heart on the breast.

“Mama, I can’t--”

Cora lifts her chin with a single finger, looking deep into the little girl’s eyes. “Sweetheart, you know that if you cannot do it now, you will be made to do it later. Show Mother that she didn’t waste all this time today because you didn’t try hard enough.”

“I am trying.” Because Regina is still her mother’s daughter, and will not let fear smother her fire.

“If you do this right, darling, you can go outside today. Would you like to go outside and play today?”

“Mama, I can do it,” Regina squeaks, little feet banging against the chair as she swings her legs in frustration, thinking of the grass outside and the laughter of the staff’s children beckoning her to play and she wants it, she can do it, she can.

“Fine,” Cora says, lip curling, and gestures to the silver ball in the center of the room.

Regina reaches out, tiny fingers spreading in the air. She concentrates as hard as she can, trying to feel the energy around the silver like her mother showed her. The ball vibrates, and Regina thinks maybe she’s got it this time, maybe this time she’ll move it, her small shoulders and ribcage shuddering with the effort. 

But the ball stops moving, and Cora sighs, heels clicking like knives on the floor as she snatches the silver ball from its pedestal, holds it in front of Regina’s face.

“Like _this_ ,” she snaps, and the ball levitates off her mother’s palm, dangles near Regina’s head only to shoot across the room, circling them so quickly that she can feel the very heat of its movement. 

And then it is coming down to rest in Cora’s palm. Cora makes a fist, and the silver ball is gone. 

“Useless child,” she says, and stalks out of the room, leaving Regina to stare at her empty hands.

 

 

 

 

Regina is six and her mother is making her sit in the laboratory again, having her blood drawn. She knows other children don’t like needles but Regina doesn’t mind anymore because she’s a big girl, and big girls aren’t afraid.

The doctor all in white looks at her blood under a microscope, and then writes something down. Cora waits beside him with a strained face, only looking back at Regina once.

“Mother,” Regina says, because by six she knows better than to ever call her Mama.

But Cora ignores her, speaking to the doctor instead. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “As I’ve told you, Mrs. Mills, the technology is not there yet. We have no way of telling whether or not those traits are present. There’s vague indicators in some specimens, types E and L here and there, but that means nothing applied across the sample--”

“Does she _have_ them?” Cora asks, her voice cool.

The doctor looks at Regina, too small for the adult-sized lab chair. “No,” he says, shaking his head at Cora, but there’s so much to his voice and it doesn’t make Regina feel afraid or upset, it just makes her feel sad. “She doesn’t.”

Regina has to spend the rest of the afternoon in her room. She presses her face against the window, trying to see the people seventy three stories on the street below, too small to make out. She knows if she waved to them, they wouldn’t see her. She knows if she yelled to them, or tried to make them see her, it wouldn’t matter.

One of the maids is watching the little television in the hall, and on the news, The Sorceress is throwing White Prince into a quarry, moving huge rocks with white and purple lights. The Sorceress is angry, unstoppable, setting fire to a factory, ripping a gash in the earth that runs through the freeway and tears a hole in a shopping mall. Regina tries to watch, but the maid sees her and quickly turns it off, pretending to do something else.

 

 

 

 

Regina is seven and still isn’t allowed to run in the house.

This does not stop her. The penthouse is two stories and there’s wide marble stairs that she’s been running up and sliding down whenever her mother’s not home. If the staff notice, they only smile and pretend not to see, going back to their work. Regina pretends the stairs are a mountain, and she alone can climb it. She pretends there is someone special waiting for her at the top of the stairs, and when she gets there, they will hold her, they will kiss her and lift her into the air and tell her she is perfect.

But today Regina runs too fast and she trips, the stairs suddenly too close to her face and she’s hitting her elbow, her face, falling backwards onto the cold stone floors. She does not cry, because Mother says a good girl does not cry, but instead she lays down in the shock of it.

When the wave of pain hits, her entire hand catches fire.

She’s caught off guard, and lets out a scream. Regina waves her hand back and forth, trying to make it go away, but the fire burns purple and white and it doesn’t hurt, it envelopes her wrist and it’s strong and it’s bright and someone’s covering it with a blanket, someone’s pulling her into their embrace and gently rubbing her hair.

The fire dies down, and then disappears altogether. Regina sniffs, looks up at Altagracia, who is holding her in her arms. 

“ _Nuestro secreto_ , Miss Regina.” The maid puts her finger to her mouth, and then kisses Regina on the forehead. “ _No se lo digas a nadie_.”

 

 

 

 

Regina is nine. Behind a locked door, she pushes the point of the scissors into her thigh, wincing. Her hand is outstretched, and the more her thigh hurts, the stronger the flames lick her palm, her fingers.

Last week, she pinched her arm to make it happen. A few days before that, she’d stubbed her toe running out of her mother’s way, and the tips of her fingers had lit up with bright little fires. She’d shoved her hand under her other arm, stalked away before anyone could see.

The scissors are deep enough to draw blood, and when Regina sucks in her breath, turns away, something happens.

The scissors fly into the air, and hover in front of her. Regina looks at them, shudders, and pushes them away, except she isn’t using her hands. Regina is using her mind.

The scissors stick into the wall, point first, like some kind of omen.

 

 

 

 

Regina is eleven and likes to go into her nanny Guadalupe’s room to watch the television. They sit on Guadalupe’s single bed, cramped into the converted closet with a television and a single folding table. They follow _telenovelas_ with names like _Fuego de Amor_ and _El Barrio_ and only change the channel when there’s a news report.

“The Sorceress nearly brought an end to Snowstorm today, but the hero rallied and took to the skies, besting her rival,” the reporter is saying, on the scene where a subway station has been upended and turned to rubble. “Right now, we’re reporting three casualties caught in the crossfire.” 

Regina watches the camera swing quickly away from the body covered in a sheet, the dark red spray on the cement. Guadalupe starts to change the channel, shaking her head, but Regina puts her hand on the remote.

Guadalupe looks at her. “ _Nena_ \--”

“ _Por favor_ , please,” she whispers, and rewinds the program, pauses on the white sheet, turning brown.

 

 

 

 

Regina is twelve and there’s a new dress laid out on her bed when she comes home from her tutor, a box on her dresser containing a pearl necklace with an emerald and diamond pendant. Regina makes a face when she sees it, but she knows if she doesn’t wear it to dinner tonight, there will be consequences.

Mr. Davis, one of Mother’s friends and top investors, keeps looking at Regina at dinner, and she stares him down, raising a single eyebrow when her mother can’t see. Sometimes she slices her meat a little too enthusiastically, and makes sure he can see how disgusted she looks with each one of his crinkled smiles. 

“You’ve grown up,” he whispers, leaning into her when her mother is ordering the servants to bring out the next course and Regina’s skin crawls, her insides twist violently.

When she’s going back to her room, he’s there in the hall, and he reaches around her, grabs her from behind. “Hello sweetheart,” he says, and she bites down on her lip to the point of bleeding, her hand igniting with violet flames. 

“You know what my mother can do, don’t you?” She manages her sweetest voice, her deadliest voice, just like Mother. “I can do much, much worse.” And she lets the flames burn hotter, and she reaches for the place between his legs.

His face when he steps quickly back, when he covers himself like a shamed old man and looks at her in terror, in horror. She remembers the way he stares at her then, takes the memory and tucks it deep into her heart, where she cannot lose it.

In his eyes, she was a monster. A beautiful monster.

And later her mother will ask her why Mr. Davis keeps his distance, why he gave so much money and then stopped calling, later it will be fights and more secrets and Regina must pretend that it was not a hand on fire and the threat of flaming castration that turned away her investor, but for now Regina is the one in charge. For now this is her truth, undeniable and open and hot to the touch.

She stops biting her lip, and the flames go down. There is a perfect round red dot on her bottom lip, a perfect sphere of blood.

 

 

 

 

Regina is thirteen, and she’s meant to be asleep, but glass is breaking upstairs and there’s a thud, a crash.

In her mother’s study, the window is broken and The Sorceress is crawling on the floor, blood smearing across the marble. Regina gasps, running over to her and helping her lay against the front of the desk.

“Mother,” she breathes, and her hand is careful to avoid the wound as she cradles her, not as deep as it had looked initially but still bleeding. “What happened?”

But Cora makes a fist, and Regina jerks in midair, slams into the wall across the room.

“Don’t _touch_ me,” Cora gasps, spitting blood onto the marble tiles. She tries to get to her feet, fails, and there’s two sharp cracks as the hard elbows of her suit hit the stone.

“I’m going to call an ambulance,” Regina says. “I’ll wake up the--”

But she cannot move, because something is tugging her forward by the collar of her pajamas, slamming her down, hard, onto the stone. Cora’s hand shoots out with less control in her pain, her energy tugging Regina towards her in a jagged movement.

“You will do no such thing,” Cora hisses, raising her head. She looks at Regina, looks at her in a way that terrifies Regina, makes her feel like her mother is finally seeing her for the first time in years, and she scowls. “I am not supposed to be wearing this suit at my age. This was all to be yours by now. You were meant to be my protege.” She spits blood again. “It’s hereditary, you know, or it’s meant to be. A normal child of mine should have inherited my powers. But _you_ ,” and with her eyes, she raises Regina up by the back of her neck, yanks her into the air. “You are useless.”

“Mother,” Regina whispers, but she is gliding out of the study and into the hallway, and door after door is being closed behind her, she is powerless until she is dropped at the top of the stairs, crumpling like a bird.

 

 

 

 

Regina is fourteen and sitting in one of the many white rooms of the laboratory, having her weekly blood drawn. There’s a girl one room down -- she can see her through the windows, sitting in a school uniform, watching the doctor as he tells her something Regina can’t hear. The girl has long braids and bright, angry eyes, and she’s shaking her head, frowning.

Sometimes there are others in the lab. Regina is not supposed to see them, but she does. Girls and boys, teenagers or adults, laid out on the tables. A girl who could disappear and come back again. A boy who could levitate off the table, and had to be held down by staff, his screams silent through the observation window. Regina had paused only momentarily then, only to be shuffled off by a nurse, tutting at her.

“We’re helping them,” Cora says simply, the only time Regina has the courage to ask.

But she knows more. She knows that Cora has found the link, that these abilities lie in bloodlines, inherited like freckles and eye color. She knows that her mother has held dinner parties in which she’s rhapsodized about the superiority of certain genetic abnormalities, and how best to further them. She knows that the ones who appear in the lab, the confused teenagers, are not found by coincidence, but by name.

The braided girl in the window is being strapped to the chair, but she doesn’t look happy about it. For a moment, she twists in the restraints, and her body hardens and undulates like a molten crust. A mistake, Regina thinks, knowing that now they will all try to make her do it again, using whatever method they feel necessary. 

Regina has not told them what she can do with her hands. The shudder of bodies on surgical tables, the spasms and silent shouts for help have told her enough.

 

 

 

 

When she was very young, they lived in the country outside of the city. Her father had a huge house and wide green acres of trees and fields and there was a stable and a barn and a deep lake, Regina remembers that she loved the lake. But then they lowered him into the ground, and sometimes Regina is afraid she doesn’t remember him at all, sometimes she only remembers the heady smell of too many roses at his grave and her mother’s iron grip on her tiny fist. 

They moved into the city, then, into the penthouse at the top of the highest skyscraper, and Mother begin to take the country piece by piece, building the corporation from a few floors below. Regina had grown up here, at the tallest place in the country. Here, at the edge of the sky. Watching her mother grow their millions into billions. Watching the lower floors converted into the offices, and the laboratories. Watching her mother moving through the air, a black streak, windows shattering and helicopters crashing and the news panning to close-up shots of Snowstorm, her suit faded from the dust, her throat in the vice grip of The Sorceress. 

Regina is fifteen, and sometimes she longs for the dark expanse of the water. She dives at the city club, the only place her mother will let her out of the sight of her security guard and driver. These become her favorite days, and her favorite moments: her body breaking the surface, a straight line, and then suspending herself in the water for a few seconds longer, knowing her hand will never ignite, knowing her secret will never betray itself here. This is the only place she is safe. Once, she overestimates the flip and lands the wrong way, her back slapping hard against the water, and under the surface, a steady boil from her palms. In the commotion, it went unnoticed, but she knew. She knows.

Regina’s legs are long and she knows what she looks like because men yell it at her from their car windows, men whistle from stoops and street corners even when she covers up, trying to sneak past her security. So she is not surprised when the other pool attendees look at her, glance at her from under the brims of their caps. She smiles back, or tries to, remembering what her mother has said about giving others what they want.

The head lifeguard smiles at her, pushes his hair out of his eyes. His name is Daniel, and he’s a senior at Duke, a business major. He’ll tell her this later when he waits for her outside of the showers, adjusting the band of his trunks.

“My friends bet me I couldn’t get your number,” he says, eagerly holding out his hand to her as if her palms had never given birth to flames.

 

 

 

 

Regina’s fifteen and fumbling in the dark of the unlit locker room, Daniel’s body pressed against hers. He’s kissing her neck, messy and wet and they’re pinned against the bench.

Regina, as always, runs headfirst into the fear and the pain, gasping for the touch of it. Daniel says he’ll be careful, that he knows how to make it so it won’t hurt, but he’s not ready yet, and she’s impatient, trying not to look down at it.

“It’s okay,” she says. “You can do it.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, shaking. He makes a choking noise, and then collapses on top of her. “I can’t.”

And just like her mother never did, she pulls his head to her chest, strokes the back of his neck and kisses his ear, coos softly.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Don’t...don’t tell, okay?”

“It’s okay,” she whispers, and decides she knows better now.

 

 

 

 

Regina’s about to turn sixteen and there’s a boy in the news who was found facedown in the city club’s pool. A broken neck, twisted impossibly, and his eyes bulging from the chlorine. The worst of it: his tongue bitten off, found later in a filter.

Regina throws up when she hears the report, when she sees the smiling lifeguard’s picture on the screen. Screams as she runs to her mother’s study, throws open the door and scatters her mother’s things from her desk.

Cora watches passively, her glasses at the end of her nose.

“Darling, that’s unbecoming behavior.”

But Regina is smashing a bust on the marble floor.

“I _know_ it was you,” she snarls, grabbing for her mother only for Cora to shift out of the way, seemingly undisturbed by it all. “He did nothing to deserve this, you’re a fucking monster, you’re a--”

“Sweetheart.” Cora gets to her feet, setting her glasses down. “Regina,” she says, her voice so cool that it enrages Regina, it makes her want to tear her to pieces. “Get yourself together.”

And she slaps Regina in the face, hard, the rings on the back of her hand stinging cold, and then hot. Regina knows her fingers are burning white and violet before she can stop herself, and Cora looks down, a new tilt to her smile. She looks between Regina’s flaming hand and Regina herself, and hits her again.

Regina’s hand burns brighter, and when Cora lifts her hand a third time to strike, Regina catches her by the wrist, lets the flames ignite. Cora’s eyebrows lift, and she draws in a quick breath, evidence of pain, only for her skin to harden over like silver. Regina bites down on her lip, knows immediately that she’s drawn blood from the wet in her mouth, and uses this to ignite her other hand.

Cora’s in the air now, out of reach. Regina remembers the scissors, focuses on the fountain pen on Cora’s desk, sends it flying up only to stick into her mother’s forearm where she’s blocked it.

“Regina,” Cora says, though now there is a strain to the coolness of her voice. She is removing the pen from her arm, a dark spot of blood remaining. “Regina, you need to stop now.”

But Regina isn’t ready to stop. Regina is six years old and being strapped into the laboratory chair, Regina is nine years old and her mother has locked her in the bedroom with no dinner, Regina is twelve and she is useless, Regina is fourteen and she is useless, Regina is almost sixteen and she is not so useless, she will never be so useless again.

It takes six men to pin her to the ground. And all the while Regina is screaming, she is digging her nails into her own flesh until her entire body is on fire.

 

 

 

 

Regina’s eighteen and the suit her mother has had made is full of inner barbs. It tightens and digs at the wrist, and there are needles to prick her along the ribs and twin chokes at her collar, two spikes that insert just beside her jugular, stimulating her nerve endings with intense feeling. It is meant to cause her as much pain as possible. It is meant to provoke as much power as possible.

The pain is so intense that it takes as much energy to stay upright as it does to control the huge fireballs in her hands. But the stronger the pain, the stronger the fury of her flames. The first needle pierces her skin, and Regina howls, the fire in her palm accelerating and filling the fireproof room. 

From the observation window, Cora is watching.

“Good,” she mouths, nodding at her daughter.

And Regina stops herself from doubling over, now panting hard. A single tear falls onto her collar. She presses against the barbs, tries again.

 

 

 

 

Nineteen and she refuses the suit. She is sitting outside the testing room, arms crossed, and Cora stands over her, frowning.

“If you don’t do it now, you’ll be made to do it later.”

“I’m not putting it on.”

“You will. Eventually, you will.”

 

 

 

 

Twenty and she is kissing a girl in the dormitory, her hair spilling out onto the pillowcase. The girl bites down on her lips, sucks and nips and groans a little. She pins Regina to the bed, and her nails are digging into Regina’s shoulders, there’s a hand around her throat keeping her in place and that tightness, that sharp little ache...Regina feels the tingle of heat on her fingertips, and she likes it.

 

 

 

 

“I’m going back to law school, and you aren’t stopping me this time.”

Twenty four and Regina Mills is in her mother’s study, putting her foot down.

Cora stares at her over her glasses, an eyebrow raised. A look Regina has perfected in her own time, one of many achievements along with graduating summa cum laude from the city university, and then interning at the district attorney’s office.

Regina is all too aware of the suit on display behind her mother’s desk. She knows its barbs and needles too well. She knows what it feels like to put it on, to embrace the pain, to use it and harness it and ride it like a wave. But she will not choose that life, that is not her path.

“Fine,” Cora says, and Regina’s almost deflated by how little her mother reacts to the declaration. “You’re of more use to me as a lawyer anyhow.”

“It’s _not_...it’s not for you. I’m doing this for me.”

“Of course darling,” Cora says, looking back down at her screen, and the conversation is over.

 

 

 

 

And 

these 

are 

the 

quiet 

years, 

the 

slow

years,

the years Regina does not give to her mother’s histories, does not give to the stories of superheroes and unnatural abilities and genetic abnormalities. 

Regina only ever uses a needle to prick her palm, and then just to light a single finger to light a cigarette, or start a candle. She does not do it where it can be seen.

She pretends that she cannot move things across the room with sheer will. She pretends that her hands have always been so bare, so useful in their plainness.

These are the years she is either the most herself, or not herself at all, depending on how she will later feel.

 

 

 

 

Thirty two and the youngest DA in the city’s history, Regina Mills soars.

She has a mother, but she does not speak to her much. Cora circles in and out of Regina’s life at her own leisure, showing up at her office when she needs something from her, ignoring her when she doesn’t. Regina prefers this way. She will sign a thousand times over to keep it this way.

She has a son, Henry, adopted four years ago. Now five, he is everything, and she orbits around him, determined to make this family the only one she’s ever known.

 

 

 

 

Thirty two and her mother is making house calls now.

“I have a gift for you,” Cora says, sitting in Regina’s kitchen, ignoring the tea that’s been made for her. Henry is in school and it’s better this way, Regina thinks. The less he sees of his grandmother, the better for all of them. “But it’s not here, it’s still at my office. You’ll have to come to mine and pick it up.”

“That sounds awfully suspicious.”

“Darling,” Cora says, smiling in that way that has always unnerved Regina slightly, the predatory glare of her mother’s teeth. “When have I ever deceived you?”

“I hope you don’t want an answer to that.”

“Power has made you disrespectful, Regina.”

“Of you?” Regina snorts. “Good.”

 

 

 

 

The gift is a young woman. A shell of a woman now, a vessel for pain. Regina watches from the observation deck as the body below writhes and spasms as if dangling at the end of a wire. Every twitch makes Regina shudder. She only realizes she’s been digging her nails into her palm when she sees the faint flames around her wrist, and pulls her hand away.

“I don’t understand.”

Cora smiles. “That’s because you don’t know what she is. Who she is.”

“I thought you said you’d stopped the experiments. They approved funding for cancer research, not this backwards--”

“Cures to any myriad of diseases you’re politically obligated to hate all lie in the unwinding of these genes.” 

The woman’s mouth is open, a silent scream. Regina feels an ache behind her collarbone. “I want no part in this.”

“I’m offering you a right hand, Regina. You are the district attorney of the largest city on the eastern seaboard. You could use someone like this.”

“I’ll make sure they cut your municipal funding.”

“We don’t need it, darling.” Cora gestures to the woman below, looking slightly more irritated. “You haven’t even asked who she is yet. You’re missing the point of all this. I’m offering you something incredible and you’re showing no interest. It’s rude, Regina.”

“I don’t want to know who she is.”

“Fine,” Cora clicks her tongue, gives Regina a final look. “But remember, dear. She’s better as your right hand than used against you.”

Regina fights every impulse to bite the inside of her mouth. “And who would do something as inhuman as that, mother?”

Cora smirks at the door. “You’d be surprised what people will pay for these days, darling.”

When Regina looks back down, the woman is lying still, panting hard, looking up at her. And it hurts her, it makes Regina ache with something fierce and sharp. She turns away.

 

 

 

 

Thirty three and another event at the governor’s mansion, another expensive dress and updone hair and laughing at the terrible jokes of politicians and eager entrepreneurs. A prisoner in pearls, Regina thinks to herself, with only a leveled dose of sarcasm, smiling her lawyer’s smile for the other guests.

“But we can’t take the anarchists seriously,” the head of City Water is saying, chuckling. “A few black sheep with grudges against their parents at the country club, making threats they can’t keep. The city can’t shut down transportation every time one of them starts posting about a pipe bomb.”

There’s a woman standing at the edge of the room, staring at Regina. A smirk, broad-shouldered, something loaded in her stance. Completely out of place.

“Just be glad we don’t have any of the supers to deal with anymore. Thank god the age of heroes is over, or whatever it is they were calling it. Good riddance. Don’t you think so, Ms. Mills?”

“I’m sorry,” Regina says, slipping past them. “If you’ll just excuse me.”

The woman sees Regina approaching, turns and disappears down the hallway to the back of the house. Regina follows, steps quickening in the dark. They’re away from the party now, and this part of the mansion is unlit, probably off-limits to partygoers like herself. She can’t tell if it’s the shadows making her stomach twist, or this woman seemingly escaping her.

“Stop,” Regina says, and the woman does, a few feet from the back door. “Turn around so I can see you. Show me your hands.”

The woman’s hands reach over her head, and she turns slowly, reluctantly. When she’s facing Regina, it’s with a few teeth grazing the edge of her lip, an eyebrow raised. Regina knows her without knowing how.

“I’m not here to--”

“Only answer my questions.” Regina narrows her eyes, steps closer. “I know you weren’t invited, whoever you are.”

The woman’s mouth resets itself into a crooked grin. “So you know everyone at these parties, huh?” She whistles. “Don’t know how you do it. All you rich people look the same to me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Emma,” the woman says. “Emma Swan.”

“Put your hands on the wall, Emma Swan. I’m going to frisk you, so I need you to remain still.”

“Usually I prefer to --”

Regina pulls back on the woman’s elbow, knowing exactly where to dig in her thumb. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

This Emma Swan person laughs, laughs as if she feels nothing, and Regina is very aware of the way her tongue runs over her teeth, how she rolls her eyes a little as she concedes and lets Regina pat her down, hands finding hard muscle, a taut body. But no weapons, nothing concealed or otherwise.

“Is now the part where you buy me a drink?”

Regina ignores the easy smile, the flexing of those forearms. “Don’t flatter yourself. I know you didn’t go through the metal detectors outside, so you didn’t go through security.”

The woman shrugs. “And how do you know that?”

“Because,” Regina repeats. “You weren’t on the guest list. So, who are you with? The anarchists, the New Dead City crew? Don Leone? Which of the many dissatisfied factions in this city sent you?”

“If I was with any of those deadbeats, shouldn’t you have called security by now?”

“Maybe I already have,” Regina bluffs, straightening her shoulders. “Or maybe I can handle it myself. You need to answer my question.”

“I’m not with any of those. I’m an independent party.”

“No one in this city is an independent party. Everyone is owned by someone else.”

Emma seems to bristle slightly at this, the muscles in her face twitching. “I’ll say it again. I’m not with them. I’m not armed, and I’m not doing anything wrong. Seems kind of like profiling to confront me like this, Ms. District Attorney.”

“When my life is threatened daily by any number of restless citizens and recently jailed criminals, I take precautions. I don’t care what your intentions are, Miss Swan. If you’re not supposed to be in this house, then I’ll help escort you out of this house. Please cooperate with the security team when they arrive.”

And she lifts her hand to the panic button at her wrist, standard now for the politicians and especially standard of the district attorney’s office, only to hear the first three gunshots. 

Emma Swan turns to her, a hand on her shoulder, and looks her in the eye. “Stay here,” she says, and with that look, Regina realizes how she knows her.

 

 

 

 

There are screams in the living room, guests ducking under tables and hiding behind couches and chairs, security running in and out of the hall with their guns drawn. “They’re outside!” someone yells from the living room, and there are more nervous screams, people telling each other to stay away from the windows.

Two of her bodyguards are already flanking Regina, leading her upstairs. Regina fights the impulse to bite down on her lip, pinch her wrist, anything to start the flames, but she knows what she cannot reveal here. She knows the limits of her new life.

A sound close to her ear, and then the wet thud of a bullet colliding with flesh, the guard to her left going down. The other bodyguard grunting and moving behind her, closing over her with his body, only for two more wet thuds, a groan and a slick feeling against the back of Regina’s dress. She swings around, the body hitting the floor as it slides off her, and yet the house is dark, the screams are too loud, and she can’t see anyone, there is no one here.

They’re in the house.

Regina pulls the needle from her pocket, an old comfort, a safety blanket. She gets ready to stab the soft flesh under her thumb, but there is another shot, another collision of body and bullet. But it’s not her body.

Emma Swan is now standing over Regina, crouched protectively. There is a bullethole in her neck, torn bloody flesh open like a gill. Regina gasps instinctively, and then forgets how to breathe altogether when the wound closes up on its own, smooths over like a hand over clay.

“It’s okay,” Emma says, as there are more gunshots, and police swarming the room. “It’s okay now.”

 

 

 

 


	3. iii. gallium

 

 

 

 

“My mother sent you,” Regina says, not a question. She is sitting in the back of the ambulance, a blanket over her shoulders placed there by a nurse. Emma is standing next to her, not a mark on her. Only a splatter of someone else’s blood on her cheek. 

“She said I should introduce myself.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she hired those men to attempt to kill me and prove your worth. It’s not outside the realm of her usual mindfucked antics.” Regina wants to spit, wants to let her hands glow. “She’s a sociopath, you know.”

Emma’s looking off somewhere else, hands behind her back. “I know,” she says quietly, plainly. “I didn’t come here to save you. She told me you might need my help.”

“Help with what?”

Emma rubs at the back of her neck as if it had not earlier been burst open by a bullet. A bullet. Regina’s still breathless at the thought. “You’ll have to tell me.”

“So you’re her errand girl.”

“No,” Emma says quickly, hotly. “I came for myself, too. I was...curious.”

“Curious about what?”

“You.”

Regina blinks at her, doesn’t know why her tongue is tracing the back of her teeth and her breath is caught in her throat. “Me.”

“She doesn’t have any power over you,” Emma says. “I wanted to know who this person was, the one Cora can’t control. I figured someone like that...they must be somethin’ else, you know?”

Regina doesn’t have anything to say to that. She tries to laugh, a single harsh sound, and then looks down, away from the other woman.

“I hope you weren’t disappointed,” Regina says, finally, quietly, half-hoping she won’t have to say anything else. Why does this woman make her blush? Why does she make her wrists heavy, her breath too warm?

“Not at all,” Emma says. “Take care,” and when Regina looks back up, the woman is gone.

 

 

 

 

Henry is asleep when she arrives at Mal’s apartment, and the other woman pours her a glass of wine, lights a candle in her expensive kitchen. Mal is from another of the city’s elite families, but she is like Regina in more ways than Regina will ever admit -- Mal can turn her skin into a thousand hard scales when she’s threatened. Cora’d had her in the labs for a time, even had a suit designed to mimic the teenage girl’s abilities, but Mal had been uncooperative, a rich girl uninterested in Cora’s rather overarching agenda, and ultimately from a wealthy enough family to give Cora something she valued almost as much as rare genes. Mal had bought her freedom, something Regina had never been able to do. Regina could only ever tear herself away, brutal piece by piece, leaving the least of it behind in the trap.

“You’re sure you’re alright?” 

“I’m fine,” Regina says, but she won’t admit that her leg is still twitching under the table. “It’s becoming par for the course, really. I haven’t been to a speech without a bulletproof vest since I ran for office.”

“Amazing that they’ve already found them all.”

Regina pauses mid-sip. “Found who?”

“The ones who did it, some terrorist cell called the Gold Hand or something. It was just on the news, here.”

Mal pulls open her laptop, finds the video of the newscaster standing in front of the alley, the bodies lit by police cars and television lights. The man on the screen looks into the camera, narrows his eyes at the flashing lights.

“A group calling themselves the Gold Hand claimed responsibility for tonight’s attack on the mayor’s ball. Not an hour later, these bodies were discovered in this alley in Midtown, now identified as five prominent members of the Gold Hand cell.”

The camera swings to the bodies, piled neatly on top of each other, their faces and chest wounds blurred out but some of their necks clearly bent at unnatural angles. And on the cement wall above them, written in white spraypaint:

_t a k e c a r e_

“CTV captured this shadowy figure running away from the scene of the crime only a few seconds after the presumed time of the attack, when it appears to leap up the side of a building and disappear. An eyewitness states that he actually heard the figure speak, and believes it was a woman.”

Now an interview with an eyewitness, a man outside a bodega. “I’m standing outside Manny’s place and someone all in black comes running out of that alley and I’m thinking, they stole something or they just mugged a sucker. But it’s wearing some kind of body armor or something, you know? And it’s running right for me, so I’m stepping back thinking shit, I’m about to get it, but it brushes into me and here’s the crazy shit, right? It’s got a girl voice. Right? It’s some chick! And she says to call the cops, because there’s some folks they’re looking for in that alley. And then I swear on my mother, I swear on the Virgin, she just flies straight up into the damn air. Right up that damn building! Four stories, maron’. Them supers are back. Them supers are back in a big way.”

Regina doesn’t realize that her knuckles are white on the edge of the table. Mal reaches across, squeezes her wrist. “Are you alright?”

Regina shakes herself off, nods too quickly. “Fine,” she says. “I’m going to go see Henry.”

In the guestroom of Mal’s apartment, Regina’s son is snoring softly. After eight years, it still makes a knot in her throat, seeing him so vulnerable, remembering his soft head as a toddler, his tiny infant fist curling up around her finger. He stirs when she sits down on the bed, twists and yawns and opens one eye to her.

“Mom?” he whispers, yawning again. “Is it morning? Why are you here?”

“Shh,” she says, and she kisses him on the forehead, strokes his hair away from his eyes. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep, little prince. You’re safe.”

And oh, how she loves him for turning back over, curling around her and going back to sleep. Oh, how she loves him.

 

 

 

 

“Where is she?”

Cora looks up from her desk, and it’s a scene that’s played out many times before, only now there is more silver in her mother’s hair, more technology on her desk and proof in her fist and the same weasel smile, the one that’s in control.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Regina. You’re raving like a lunatic, darling. Sit down.”

“I told you that I wanted no part in your schemes. I don’t need a bodyguard, or whatever the hell you think she is.”

“Honestly, Regina--”

“Swan, that’s her name, isn’t it? Your latest Frankenstein. I’m not interested in your pet project, mother. I’m the district attorney, I’m not letting you loose another super on this city--”

“Regina.” Cora holds up a hand, takes off her glasses. “I merely trained the woman. I gave her a suit, and I gave her some tips. And then I let her go on her merry way.”

“You never let anyone go. That’s not how you work.”

“She’s not here, at any rate.”

Regina spreads her hands across the front of her mother’s desk, leaning forward, hoping it comes across as a threat. “Then where is she?”

Cora merely blinks. “If you must know, darling, she’s meeting her parents.”

 

 

 

 


	4. iv. cuprum

 

 

 

 

Emma drives sixteen miles outside of the city, where the streets turn to warehouses and strip clubs, and then to shopping plazas and chain restaurants, and finally to gated communities, to expensive boutiques and white fences and bus stops used only by maids and nannies. She counts the houses when she finds the road, pulls up to the gate of number 24.

It takes a whole minute to drive from the road up to the house itself, a row of tall oaks and landscaped lawns and she can feel her fingers twitching on the wheel, just being in the presence of this, this money and this comfort and whatever it all is.

The road ends in a circular drive, a fountain in the center, and there’s almost something nauseating about it, or maybe that’s just her nerves, making her knuckles itch. She straightens her shirt, the jeans she made sure didn’t have any holes. They’d given her clothing when she’d first arrived at training, part of the Mills estate out in the country, some former stables converted into an Olympic-caliber training center. Old habits though, and she’d worn everything down to its bare threads, training hard, running hard, putting her hands through one thing or another.

“Everything you want,” Cora had said to her when she’d first come out to visit, to see her progress, “Is yours should you prove worthy. If you want to go back to the streets, I’ll have them drop you off tomorrow. But if you stay here, and you earn your place, you may have whatever you desire. Does that make sense?”

It had.

A year she’d trained. There were others there: Mulan, who fought like a beast and could change herself into a boy and back again; Aladdin, able to jump whole fields without breaking a sweat, and other rotating men and women, some of them staying and succeeding, some of them not. They left in the night, and they did not come back. Or if they were like Emma, they stayed, and they trained harder.

And then had come the night when Cora had invited her into the city. She remembers the dark of the penthouse, the blue light of the television. The videos kept playing and she knew them all, the handheld camera phone capturing teenage Emma taking a crowbar to the face, a boy slamming a baseball bat into her side. She saw the video where they’d smashed her hands with their steel-toed boots and then videoed as they’d miraculously repaired, teenage voices yelling and cheering. She saw her own face, bruised only for a minute, exhausted and worn but the fire in her eyes, the fire, staring into the camera, and then looking away. Emma hadn’t been able to move, standing in front of that television, watching herself take hit after hit.

“You’ll never know what I felt when I saw these for the first time,” Cora’s voice, and suddenly she’d come up behind her. Emma looked over, saw the way Cora was watching, too, the glow in her eyes, the admiration, the...hunger, like an animal.

Emma looked back at the television, tried to steel herself. “I don’t understand.”

“We’ve been looking for you for a very long time, Emma. I wasn’t sure how we would find you, but I knew we would. When these videos first appeared on the Internet, I knew you were the one. But you proved hard to get our hands on. You disappear quite effectively, you know.”

“Benefit of being homeless,” Emma said. Onscreen, a wrench to the eyesocket. “Why were you looking for me?”

“Because of your parents.”

Emma felt her breath catch. “My parents?”

“You’re the first pure super, Emma.”

“Wait, you know who my--”

“Born of two supers, the convergence of two lineages. The specimens that come through our laboratories all contain mere fragments of a gene, passed down from random ancestors, difficult to trace because of the intermingling with non-super blood. But you are different. Your parents are both supers.”

“My parents,” Emma repeated, and it sounded like a prayer, a mantra. She would repeat it in her head for a whole day, preparing for something she’d never thought she’d see. My parents.

And now Emma is standing at their front door, ringing the doorbell.

The woman who answers has grey in her hair, tired but huge eyes. She looks at Emma curiously, pulls on the sleeve of her blue sweater as she steps onto the wide stone landing. “I’m sorry,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “Can I help you?”

“I...” and she realizes that she has no idea what she was supposed to say, if she’d ever known what to say at all. “You came to my window once?” 

And there are tears in the woman’s eyes as she cocks her head, her nose wrinkling as she tries to hide her recognition. It’s too late. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice breaking. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“My name is Emma. You left me next to the highway. I’m your daughter.”

 

 

 

 

Emma feels strange sitting on the couch, like she might get it dirty. She leans forward, elbows on the tops of her thighs, maintains a position like she could spring up at any minute, on the defense. She doesn’t know why she feels on edge. She doesn’t know why something she’d thought about for nights, years, entire chunks of her childhood, is making her sick to her stomach.

She is acutely aware of the two suits on display in the corner of the room, one pale blue and white, and the other pure white, set with gold armor. 

“Do you want anything else to drink?” White Prince, or David, as he introduced himself, rubbing at his chin and turning red, keeps offering her things. Snowstorm, and her name is Mary Margaret, sits beside him, leg pressed against his, nodding frantically.

“It’s fine,” Emma says. “Really, it’s fine.”

“I’m sure you have so many questions,” Mary Margaret says, her mouth breaking into a huge, almost alarming smile. The same smile on the cover of the magazine Emma used to read so many times that the seam split in two. “We’re open books, really. Whatever you want to know, we’re here to tell you. We’re your...we’re here to help.”

“Why did you give me up?”

David looks at Mary Margaret, their smiles suddenly strained. “We thought you might start with that one,” he said. “If you ever found us, we knew that’d be the first thing you asked.”

“Anyone would,” Emma says, wishing she didn’t feel defensive about this. “Anyone would want to know why their parents left them under an overpass.”

Mary Margaret laughs nervously, her fingers knitting together. “It sounds a bit horrible when you say it like that.”

“It’s how you kill a baby, actually. You leave them somewhere no will find them, and they’ll die of exposure.”

“No,” David says, too quickly, and reaches out and places a hand on her knee and she feels her entire body stiffen. He pulls it away, turning red. “No, we did not want you to die. It’s just...it’s very complicated, honestly. If it wasn’t so complicated, we would have found a better way to deal with it.”

“It being me?”

“You have to understand, Emma,” Mary Margaret is now wringing her hands, biting her lip again. “We really weren’t in a position to be parents. We are...we _were_ supers. I mean, my career would have been over, and I had a hard enough time hiding my pregnancy in a spandex suit. I had to go into ‘hiding’--” she makes quotation marks with her fingers “--and honestly, I was so distracted by our work, and we had enemies, we had our nemesis and it’s just not the type of lifestyle where you can be a mother. A child is collateral damage, you know how it is. Especially with her, and she didn’t have boundaries like most of us. Most of us take off the cape and we live our lives and we nod at each other in the grocery store. But not her.”

“The Sorceress.”

“Yes, her,” David says. “Did you...did you ever watch the news growing up? Sometimes we were all on there.”

“I had your action figures,” Emma says. “I clipped all your articles. I had a video, too.”

David turns red again, smiling under his beard. “Oh,” he says. “That’s...wow, that’s really something.”

“And you came to my window,” Emma turns to Mary Margaret. “I saw you. So you knew who I was, you knew I was your daughter.”

Mary Margaret goes white, presses her hands between her knees. “I did have regrets at one point, I was able to seek you out, but...I realized that was a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Well, I...it seemed like teasing you. It didn’t seem fair.”

“Have you always been this rich?” 

David blinks. “Sorry?”

“You have all this land, and this huge house. You’re rich.”

Mary Margaret has turned red now, wringing her hands again. “Well, there’s a lot of money in the line of super work, so I suppose, well, you know. It does add up.”

“You saw where I lived.”

The woman sitting across from Emma looks physically uncomfortable, as if she’s about to be sick. “I did, yes.”

“We just weren’t ready,” David adds, trying to save something, but Emma wants to remind him he’s not a super anymore, at least not the kind that puts on a suit. “We’re sorry, of course.”

“We are.” Mary Margaret dabs at her eyes with her sleeve. “We really are, Emma.”

“S’fine,” Emma says, suddenly wishing she hadn’t brought it up. She’s realizing there’s no answers here, nothing she would have ever sought out before, and that kills her in a way. “Look, I’m sorry I came out here without any warning. I guess I thought...well, I don’t know what I thought.” 

She sees it then, the photo on the mantle. And the other photos, faces she wasn’t registering before. Mary Margaret and David with a baby, a toddler, a boy in a school uniform. A boy in his graduation cap, standing between them in the portrait on the mantle. They follow her gaze, and then David stutters, clears his throat.

“That’s, uh--”

“You have a kid.”

“Leo,” Mary Margaret says quickly, almost under her breath. 

Emma stands up, goes to the photo. She picks it up, looks between the smiling faces and the ones now staring at her from the couch, staring at her like she’s holding a bomb. “This is his graduation photo, from college, so he’s...he’s not that much younger than me.”

Mary Margaret smooths her pants, nods curtly. “He’s five years younger than you, yes.”

Emma puts the frame back down, swallows. “But--”

“When you were born, I wasn’t ready. Neither of us were, and I mean that quite literally, you were born prematurely. When David...when your father went to cut the umbilical cord, it immediately grew back. We tried again, and again.” Mary Margaret’s voice is steelier now, and it’s her Snowstorm voice now, it’s the voice Emma heard growing up. “Every time, it grew back. So we knew...”

“We knew you were different.” David says, a hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“I was like you,” Emma says, and it comes out as no more than a whisper.

“You were different,” Mary Margaret repeats, firmly.

“Is Leo different? Is he like us?”

“No,” David says. “He’s...normal, if you want to put it that way.”

Emma swallows, doesn’t realize there are tears in the corners of her eyes. Fuck, she hates crying. She didn’t want to cry in front of them. “But I wasn’t different,” she says, gritting her teeth to keep from showing her anger, her sorrow, her everything. “I was like you. Why wouldn’t you want me if I was just like you?”

“It’s not like that, Emma,” David says, and then Mary Margaret is stepping towards her, clutching her hand. Emma wants to pull away but she lets her take it and squeeze her palm. 

“Oh, Emma,” Mary Margaret says, smiling that smile again. “You were the best thing we ever did with our life.”

“But you didn’t do anything,” Emma says, unable to hide her disgust. “You had nothing to do with who I am.”

But that’s not really true, because she knows that the thought of them was sometimes a hollow space, perhaps like an egg or a round stone, that she would shape herself around, and now that she sees them she realized she never did get the shape right, that she gave it too much room, too much credit.

“I’m sorry,” Emma says, looking for the way out. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“How did you find us?” David says, trying to follow her as she’s heading for the door.

“Cora,” Emma’s pushing them aside, looking for her jacket. “Cora Mills gave me your address.”

But there’s a hand on her shoulder, firm and too strong and it catches her there. “Emma, how do you know Cora Mills?”

Mary Margaret’s at her side now, brow furrowed with concern. “Emma, you can’t trust that woman. She’s the--”

“I know,” Emma says. “I know what she is.” 

But David’s concern is not for Emma, and his grip on her is starting to dig into her flesh. “She sent you here?”

“I came on my own.” Emma shrugs him off, uses her own super strength to pry his fingers from her arm. David takes a step back, seemingly in shock. “And I’m leaving now, so it doesn’t matter.”

“No, Emma, you have to listen to us--”

But it doesn’t take super strength to slam a door.

 

 

 

 

She doesn’t know why she drives to the district attorney’s house. She doesn’t know this woman, she doesn’t know why it seems like she would understand, why she thinks of the brunette and her soft hands and she imagines them being so warm, so comforting. She doesn’t know why she thinks there’s an answer in this house. She doesn’t know why she does any of this at all.

But the woman at the door doesn’t seem entirely surprised, and there’s something quiet in her stance, something sure. Emma wants to be near to it, and stay near. Emma gets out of the car, looks at the brunette standing on her porch, hip cocked in that skirt, arms folded over her blouse.

“What are you doing here?” Regina asks, and Emma notices her hair is falling out of its loose ponytail, notices the nervous curl of her fingers. 

“I don’t know.”

“Well.” Regina looks her up and down, makes Emma shiver. “Come in, then.”

 

 

 

 


	5. v. titanium

 

 

 

 

Emma Swan is sitting in Regina’s living room, telling her about how Cora plucked her from the streets. She tells her about the hours of sweating, of being hooked up to machines before being battered with feeling and torn limbs. How they learned her fingers would grow back. How they learned they could stop her heart with a bullet, and it would start again. How her hands could go through flesh and bone and silicon and steel, but not other metals. How they taught her to push against the ground to move upwards, how she could use the immutability of her strength to take leaps so huge they could count as flying.

She tells her about the parents that could not explain away their rejection. She tells her about the families she’d grown up and in and out and through, a weed from a crack, the stepfather that laid his hands on her, the stepfather that fell through the sky with a hole in his middle. 

She tells her everything. And Regina listens, Regina cannot move from her chair when she listens to this woman. Regina cannot exist anywhere but in this room, in the presence of this other person, when she tells her everything.

“Well,” Regina says, when Emma is pulling her coat on and brushing off her pants and standing in the foyer, biting her lip. “This was...I appreciate, uh...thank you for coming, Miss Swan.”

And she holds out her hand to shake Emma’s, and Emma looks at it. Regina wonders, wonders if she knows, but it’s Emma’s hands that are closed and she’s pulled them near to her body.

“I don’t touch people,” Emma says. “Not unless I want to hurt them.”

“Surely they taught you to control that.”

“Yeah, they did,” and Emma’s shaking her head, breathing harder. “But I still won’t. I just...old habits die hard and all that.”

“You won’t hurt me,” Regina says, still holding out her hand. Emma shakes her head again, shrugs, but Regina reaches out anyway, she takes her hand.

Nothing happens. Regina doesn’t know why she thought it would. There are no flames, no piercing throbbing pains, no melting flesh or electric shocks or sandstorms. Just two hands, and the warmth between. Skin on skin. 

“See,” Regina whispers, runs her fingers over the back of Emma’s hand. “It’s okay.”

Emma’s other hand reaches out, slowly, cautiously, and she runs just the tips of her fingers up Regina’s bare arm, testing. Regina shivers, and Emma looks at her with concern, her brow furrowing. “It’s okay,” Regina whispers again, nods to let her know she’s alright. When Emma reaches Regina’s shoulder, her hand travels across her collarbone, and Regina is aware of how close she is to her neck, to her breasts, how vulnerable she is and how every single inch of her is on fire, but not in the old way.

“I’m sorry,” Emma says, pulling her hands back to her sides. It breaks the spell of the moment, and Regina collects herself, nodding quickly. 

“It’s fine,” she says. “Don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. And...be careful, if you’re going to keep running around alleys, killing terrorists or whatever you have planned next.”

Emma turns as she walks to the door, smirks over her shoulder. “You’ve got the wrong woman, Ms. Mills.”

 

 

 

 

_Six of the most wanted criminals in the state have been found dead in their homes, more at 6._

_I saw her! I saw the Savior!_

_Yeah man, those gangs, you know how they are. Well, couple of ‘em are on these girls, trying to grab ‘em and all that for their initiation, and this super swoops out of nowhere, beats the shit out of ‘em. Man, that chick is saving this city. This chick’s the fucking Savior._

_And at the top of the hour, we’ll be reporting on the recent discovery of an entire house of neo-nazi extremists found gagged and tied to each other in the basement. Is the Savior to thank for this act of charity? For more on the rising popularity of this masked vigilante, let’s turn to Chet Romaine for the story. Chet?_

Regina turns up the television, smiles to herself over the sink.

 

 

 

 

“Do you remember when I said I didn’t need your help?”

But she can’t help but make her tone at least a little pleased, a little wanting. Regina wore a tighter dress today, spent thirty minutes perfecting her eyeliner, knowing that Emma Swan was going to be showing up at the district attorney’s office. She was raised to look the truth dead in the eye and then politely skirt around it, which is what she may be doing now, flirting and then taking quick little steps away.

“And how exactly am I helping you, Ms. Mills?”

“You’re cleaning up my city.”

“Maybe I just really like this city. Maybe I’m a concerned citizen. I don’t think it needs to be a personal favor to you.” Emma’s smirking, and maybe Regina’s reading too much into it but the way she’s standing seems so comfortable, so natural. “Or are you trying to make it personal?”

“Just don’t get yourself killed in the name of my office, that’s all.”

“So you’re concerned for my well-being.”

“I’m concerned that your vigilante hobby is not strictly legal, at least not in the eyes of a district attorney. And the people of this city are very invested in you. It makes it very difficult for me to point out your flaws, if you understand my meaning.”

Emma’s still smirking, the sheer daring attractiveness of her. “And what about you, as the district attorney? Are you invested?”

Regina just gives her a look, raises a single eyebrow to let her know that line of questioning is very much over. Inside, an entire part of her twists and turns and does flips on a carousel. Yes, she is invested.

 

 

 

 

The Savior is standing on Regina’s balcony, or rather half-crouched, having just leapt from seemingly nowhere onto the landing. Regina sits upright in bed, covering herself with a sheet, extremely aware of the sheerness of her slip.

She opens the French doors, narrows her eyes at the super standing in the moonlight.

“What are you doing here?”

The Savior lifts her mask back, smirks. “Did you get my message?”

She had, in fact. On the evening news, a pile of unconscious mafia dons with the word “dinner?” spray painted on the wall behind them.

Regina raises an eyebrow, trying to hide her amusement. “Do you usually take dinner after midnight?”

“I just wanted to know what your answer is.”

Regina smirks, leans against the door frame. “It’s yes, Emma.”

“Well,” Emma says, and she takes that step closer, closes the space between them and it makes Regina ache, it makes something in her warmer like a stone in the sun. She wants to stay here forever. “It’s a date, then.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Miss Swan.”

“Who is Miss Swan? They call me the Savior.” And before Emma turns to leap back off the balcony -- a show-off move, even for a super, Regina will later think with a red-cheeked smirk -- Regina touches her arm.

“I...can I show you something?” she asks, and Emma looks at her with concern, nodding slowly. “It’s not a bad thing,” Regina says, smiles gently. “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

She goes to the drawer beside her bed, takes out the needle that spends every night in the same place, when it is not in her pocket during the day. She returns to the balcony, holding it between her fingers, and Emma regards it cautiously.

Regina presses the needle to her palm, the same place at the ball of her thumb where she’s made a thousand pricks, and her hand lights up into flames.

She hears Emma’s quick intake of breath, the noise in the back of her throat. “You’re...you’re like us,” Emma says. 

Regina releases the needle, lets it hover in the air between them, gently rising up to Emma’s eyelevel before Regina plucks it out of the air, returns it to her hand.

“I am,” Regina says, in a way she hopes sounds sure. She has never actually been sure.

“But why don’t you--”

“Because I don’t want to,” Regina says, the simplest of the reasons, but certainly not the only one. “It was my choice.”

“I understand,” Emma says, and it wasn’t what Regina had expected, it throws her off and she swallows quickly. “It makes sense, actually.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, it does.” The Savior rubs the back of her neck, just like the first night they’d met, when her fingers had brushed over the spot where the bullet had made a red and white blossom of her flesh. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“I know,” Regina says. “You might be the only person in this city that I trust.”

Emma’s eyes go wide like a child’s, just for a second. Regina smiles at that.

“That’s quite the responsibility,” Emma says, but she’s blushing. The vigilante herself is blushing.

“You’re a super, aren’t you?” Regina smirks at her, steps back inside the French doors. “I think you can handle it.”

 

 

 

 


	6. vi. yttrium

 

 

 

 

It goes like this:

She knows now.

Knows the dance of the vigilante, the one-two punch and the thud of the fist against flesh and it's two steps to the right, a step to the left. It's a dance to the wail of the sirens and the police scanner turned all the way up. She sleeps in her suit most days, and she only sleeps during the day. And when she sleeps it is unforgiving, shallow, never enough to fill the mind like a bath with something warm and cleansing. 

Knows to get out of the way fast and hard when someone's coming, knows how to leave a trail or never be there at all. The gangster, the crook, the trafficker, the abuser - knows their faces, knows their expression of shock, pain, desperation, death.

Doesn’t know how to stop herself from running headfirst into knives and bullets. Doesn’t know why she’d rather take a hole in her side than not.

Doesn’t know what to do with her hands when they aren’t causing pain. And it’s a just pain, it’s a deserved pain (it _must_ be, she cannot think of the alternative) but it’s pain, and it’s dealt by her hands.

Doesn’t know why, in those in betweens, those minutes of waiting on rooftops or crouching to wipe the blood from her eyes, she thinks of dark hair and teeth grazing lips and warm skin under her fingertips, something soft and round cupped in her hands. Doesn’t know why it makes her breath slow down and speed up at once. Doesn’t know why she lets herself sink entirely into these thoughts, like dark water rising too fast, like a flood she can’t escape. Doesn’t know.

 _Knows_ , though. Of course she knows. Stupidly, stubbornly, unquestionably knows. 

Numbers on the scanner, and then the buzz of her phone. Emma pulls down the mask, leaps out the fire escape. Pushes the rest of it into tomorrow and the next day.

 

 

 

 

Cora Mills is in Emma’s apartment when she gets back in the morning. She is wool and silk and pearls and high cheekbones, high as the skyscrapers she descends from - a stark contrast to the apartment that Emma barely sees the inside of most days, the takeout containers in the sink, the unused couch and chair, the wall with its various holes and dents from stray elbows and backs of hands. It was the Mills Corporation that paid for this penthouse in a high rise partly owned by Cora and her board, just like they pay for the expensive furniture and the full fridge and the rotating performance enhancing suits that show up unannounced in Emma’s closet. 

Cora stands in the center of it all, out of place, out of time. Emma’s just getting back from an interrupted burglary, crawling in through the fire escape, pulling off her mask. At first, when she sees the dark hair, the figure with her back to the window, her stomach flutters. And then Cora turns, the early morning light illuminating her features, and Emma clears her throat. Scolds herself for the fluttering.

“Mrs. Mills,” she says, straightens up once she’s through the window. Sets her shoulders, flexes her hands. Shows she is still a good weapon. “I didn’t know you were coming. I could have just gone down to the office --”

“No,” Cora says, her eyes still roaming the room. “I was in the neighborhood.” She smirks at the blood stain on the couch, probably something that seeped out of Emma’s suit when it was thrown there, someone else’s leftovers. “I like what you’ve done with the place, dear.”

“Yeah,” Emma says, rubs the back of her neck. She’s probably turning red. “Sorry about that. I’ll, uh, I’ll clean that up.”

“Nonsense, I’ll have someone take care of it today. I’m not sure why you keep turning away the maid. It’s her _job_ to clean for you, it’s not something you should _apologize_ for.”

“Look, I’m not ungrateful or anything. I’m just...I’m not really home that much.”

“Yes, you’ve been very busy lately, it seems,” and here, Cora makes a face. “It’s come to my attention that you’ve been taking on some outside work. Are the contracts we provide not enough?”

Emma fulfills all her contracts with the Mills Corporation, it’s true. But most of the time that involves playing bodyguard to some visiting oil tycoon whose despotic rule has made him a target. Sometimes that involves killing rich people for other rich people. There are other things, too. Cora introducing her to men without names, men who are looking for a weapon. Introductions that turn into auctions. Auctions that become contracts, and marks, and terrible deeds.

“I appreciate the work, honestly.”

“I try not to overburden you, dear, which is why you’ll only hear from us every month or so. But if you need something more to fill the time--”

The police scanner goes off, the sound of the operator’s tinny voice projected through the apartment. Cora looks at Emma, smiles in a way that still manages to unnerve her. Emma winces.

“Is that urgent?” Cora’s upper lip curls into the grin.

Emma tries to shrug, knows she’s not getting away with it. “It’s fine,” she says. “It’s more for something to listen to, that’s all.”

“Of course,” Cora says, and her smile continues to let Emma know that she believes not a word of this. “This has become quite the hobby for you, dear.”

“Yeah,” Emma nods. “It’s a hobby. That’s all.”

“And where exactly does my daughter fit into this hobby?”

Emma’s mouth goes dry, but she attempts a shrug again, keeps her eyes forward. “Regina is...”

“Is what, exactly, Emma? I know my daughter, and bless whatever idealistic thoughts she’s inspired in you, but she doesn’t have your best interests at heart. You’re more of a tool to her, darling. Having you clean up her city’s crime for her, taking out her enemies.” Cora clicks her tongue. “Tut, tut. She’s very selfish, isn’t she? Putting you at risk for her own gain.”

“She didn’t ask me to do any of this.”

“Of course she did. Because the alternative would be you deliberately choosing to take everything the Mills Foundation has given you, everything _I_ have given you, and shoving it back in our faces. Choosing to waste your time and your potential on petty shows of vigilante justice.” Cora says all of this with a straight face, an even tone. She continues to smile, her eyebrows arched. “You would never do anything like that, Emma. Not after everything I’ve done for you. You’re a grateful girl, you know that. And this Savior business, that’s not what you want. Don’t you remember what you’ve always said, since the very beginning? You never wanted to be a super.”

Emma looks around her, at the apartment she doesn’t own, and the clothes she didn’t buy, and how nothing...nothing belongs to her. 

Cora smooths her coat now, smiling again. “Have I made myself clear, darling?”

Emma nods, knots her fingers together.

“Good,” Cora says. “There’s a contract for you tonight. I’ve left the details on the table but someone will be in contact this evening. 50 thousand for a clean run. You’re free, aren’t you? None of this little hobby to distract you, right?”

Emma nods again. “Yes.”

“Perfect.” Cora sighs, looking Emma over. “You really are a stunning specimen, dear.”

 

 

 

 

It goes wrong.

The mark is at the Four Seasons, the Gold Suite. She knows this one, she’s been sent here before for men like this one - men in thousand dollar suits who own the banks that own the world, men who line the pockets of people like Cora Mills, or men who try and break her. Not that these marks are ever Cora’s personal business. Cora’s personal business is the business she makes from letting Emma loose on the world, a loaded gun.

But he knows she is coming. There’s two guards in there and they’re armed and they’re heavily armored and they’re not coming down that easy, not even against a super. It’s not until one of them disappears through a wall that she realizes why -- they’re supers, too.

 _Fuck._

The first one goes down after a while, his lightning-sparking fingers no match for someone whose body can’t act as a receptor. But the second is fast and he can move through walls and windows and she’s not quick enough somehow, he keeps dodging her and covering the mark.

But he comes down, and so does the mark. And it’s a mess, a mess of thumps and dents and there’s more than blood on her suit, there’s pink on her knuckles that must be brain and something else. It’s when she’s wiping her knuckles on her front that she hears it.

The crying.

There’s a girl in the closet. She’s maybe thirteen, fourteen. She’s wearing the negligee of someone much older. Her knees are pulled to her chest, and when Emma opens the closet door, she screams, shirks away, hiding her head.

“Shit,” Emma says. “I’m not gonna hurt you, okay? It’s okay.”

But she keeps crying, and she won’t stop crying, and Emma can’t help but see the bruises on her arms, the sloppily applied makeup that makes her look like a little girl, playing dress up.

Cora’s rule is that these matters are solved by Emma, and Emma alone. A representative from the Mills Foundation may follow up the next day, to test her post-active reflexes, to ask about her suit, if it needs repairs or updates, but there is nothing more to these contracts. The mark is taken care of? Emma is done. Her role is complete. Nothing to trace back to Emma and thus nothing to trace back to Cora Mills and especially nothing to trace back to the Mills Corporation itself.

She goes to the phone beside the four post bed, and takes a deep breath. She dials 911. She helps the girl out of the closet, and into a chair, and she waits.

The first cop through the door does a double take when he sees the three bodies, the mess against the walls and the floor, the preteen in lingerie. And then when he looks at Emma, still wearing her mask, he takes a step back, hand on his gun.

“It’s okay,” Emma says, holds up her hands. “I’m--”

“ _Shit!_ ” The cop coming in the door has his gun drawn, but he grins when he sees her, eyes wide. “That’s the goddamned Savior!”

 

 

 

 

Regina’s phone buzzes, and then the door buzzes, and she opens her eyes. She has contemplated this ceiling many times. She’s stared up at it while her thoughts went to her son’s safety or her mother’s constant and painful attempts at disconnect and worst of all, Emma Swan. Emma Swan in her suit, jumping off the balcony. Emma Swan at her office, grinning her crooked grin, hands in the loops of her jeans. Emma Swan unzipping Regina’s dress, nipping the space between her jaw and her ear, digging her nails in and turning her over and pushing her legs apart and--

The door buzzes again, and she looks at her phone. Her first thought is panic, of any number of situations that have all been possible for the last month -- vengeful criminals, vengeful mothers -- but the name on the screen is familiar.

_i know it’s late. i’ll try not to wake the kid. just need to talk. - Emma_

The woman at the door is wearing the entire Savior suit, black and red, the mask in her fist. Regina’s heart is pounding for no reason, or every reason.

“I’m sorry,” the Savior says. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Regina is aware that she is wearing her slip, and she pushes her hair out of her face, covers her chest with an arm, knowing full well what it would reveal. “Can’t do what?”

“I don’t really know where to begin.”

“Oh.” Regina says, bites her lip. “You should come in. Do you want to talk?”

“No,” Emma says, and it’s firm, it makes something inside Regina throb.

“You don’t want to talk.”

“No,” Emma repeats. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Well,” Regina starts, and then she finds herself reaching out for Emma’s face, wiping at the dark patch of dried blood above her brow. “We don’t have to talk.”

And then she leads the Savior to her bedroom.

 

 

 

 

“Have you ever done this before?”

Regina is caught off guard, gives the other woman a skeptical look. “Of course I’ve--”

“No,” Emma says, quieter, cautiously. “I mean, with someone like me. Another super.”

“Oh,” Regina breathes. “No.”

“Me neither.” Emma’s fingers are running down the side of Regina’s face, cupping her jaw, as if testing the skin itself.

“We’ll be careful,” Regina says, though she doesn’t know how true that will be. Already, just a touch from this woman and she feels herself coming undone, feels every thread unwinding and unlacing and falling to the floor.

“I’ve always held back. I’ve always been afraid of something happening.”

“I’m different,” Regina says, and it’s the first time she’s said those two words and meant them so fully, so completely. For so long she’s wanted to be nothing but normal, as far from her mother and those broken skyscraper dreams as possible, but in this moment, she would turn to steel for this woman. She’d burn as a single flame if that’s what it took. “I can take it. In fact...” She puts her hand over Emma’s, brings it down to curl around her neck. When she squeezes the hand beneath her own, her windpipe tightens, and her fingertips spark. “I don’t like to be gentle all the time.”

Brutality as intimacy, a language Regina has spoken for so long that she’s transformed its meanings a dozen times over. Emma releases her grip on Regina’s neck, takes a tenuous look at her own palm, at Regina’s skin, and Regina knows she’s waiting for something to appear, waiting for some kind of disaster to form there. When nothing happens, her body loosens up, and she sighs, something like relief, something like letting go, and plunges forward.

 

 

 

 


	7. vii. tungsten

 

 

 

 

Regina opens her eyes, already smiling, already reaching with a stray hand that has made flames and pain but also pleasure, so much pleasure, only to find that she is alone in her bed. The sheet covers her naked form, but it’s pulled back beside her, and the door to her balcony is open, the curtain blowing in the early morning wind. Rain is coming. The air is heavy, cold, enough to elicit a shiver from her.

She sits up, blinks at the silence.

There is no note, and she checks her phone once, and then again, and then again.

She traces the events of last night as many times as she can, trying to find a fault line, a moment when it must have been too much: the push and the pull of their bodies, the way she’d gasped and buried her moan in a pillow, clutched at Emma’s back as her fingers sparked and caught fire. Emma pinning her down and following every order, no matter the escalation: harder, harder, faster, more, _harder_. 

Henry is already downstairs, making himself toast in his pajamas. She musses his hair, helps him reach his favorite jam in the cupboard, and he tugs on her dressing gown, hugs her side with his small arms.

“Why are you sad today, mom?”

“I’m not sad,” she says, starts the coffee. “Why would you say that?”

“You look sad,” he says, looking up at her. “Can we make you happy?”

“You always make me happy.”

And she kisses his forehead, and pulls him into her embrace, and there is no city in that embrace, no Mills Tower and no rotating court of criminals and villains. No daughter of the Sorceress. No Savior.

 

 

 

 

She’s at the office on a Sunday night, and she isn’t the only one. The case she’s working on is massive, sometimes intimidating and impossible when the files of evidence keep showing up and disappearing in equal amounts. The leader of the largest syndicated crime ring in the tristate area, Jafar Agrab, a catch that could make or break the entire office of the district attorney. She knows what this means for reelection. She knows what this means for her future.

The paralegal knocks around 9:30, looks white as a sheet when her head rounds the door.

“What is it?” Regina asks, pulls off her glasses.

The paralegal swallows, runs a nervous hand through the hair falling out of her ponytail. “Jafar is dead.”

Regina nearly chokes on the fresh lump in her throat. “No,” she says. “ _No_ , that’s impossible. He’s been confined for his safety for the past six weeks. No one should be able to get to him.”

“It’s the super, it looks like.”

Regina drops the file in her hand. “What super?”

“The Savior.”

Regina feels her mouth drying, tries to control her breathing, fast threatening to speed up too fast for reckoning. “The Savior doesn’t make kills. She turns people in.”

“Not anymore, it seems.” The paralegal pulls out her ponytail, sighs. “Everyone’s freaking out. I think they need to hear from you.”

“Of course,” Regina says, swallows. “I’ll be right out.”

And when she is left alone, before she needs to address the dozens of people who have gathered every night for hours, for days, for weeks, to tell them that all this work is essentially for nothing, before she needs to talk to the police about bringing in the Savior as a murder suspect, before she needs to wait at the station to see the woman she went to bed with last night delivered in handcuffs, she closes her door, and her windows. She stabs her palm with the needle, lets both hands ignite into wild purple fire.

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

 

 

 

 

Jafar Agrab’s body was found without its head or hands. Spray painted above the corpse in the same white as the Savior’s signature, a few words:

_A gift for the DA_

Regina stares at the photos, flips through them countless times. How could she do something like this? How could she be so fucking _stupid_?

One of the chief of police’s men gets off the phone, shakes his head. “Still no sign of her, ma’am.”

“She should have turned herself in. She _will_ eventually, I’m sure of it.”

He runs his tongue over his teeth, nods quickly. “Right, well,” he says, and she can tell he is trying to stand taller, wider, more assured. Of course he is not. “Until she does that, she’s technically evading arrest. 14 hours of it, as of now.” He shifts his stance, looks momentarily uncomfortable. “No one has come forward with knowledge of her true identity. Is that likely to happen?”

“No,” Regina says, firmly. She knows what he’s asking. “I don’t think anyone knows who she really is.”

And perhaps this is true, for now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emma had woken up first that morning. Actually, she hadn’t done much sleeping at all. She’d intended to leave when they were through, make her quick exit, the safe exit, but those first touches had turned into hours, repeat performances -- 

\-- and towards the end, panting, soaked, they’d collapsed into the pillows. She could still taste the salt of her sweat on her upper lip, and the taste of something else, more metallic. 

“Wow,” Emma had whispered, and Regina had smiled. 

Regina had closed her eyes, turned onto her side, and Emma had watched her: the strong line of her spine, her shoulderblades, the way she shifted and sighed in her sleep. And Emma, still so careful, ran a finger along the edges and the curves of her sleeping form. Her hands were not causing pain. Her flesh was not a death sentence. She could make something here, something beautiful.

For the first time in a very long time, perhaps the entire time she’d been on this earth, Emma Swan felt completely happy.

Just before dawn, there was a tap on the French doors to the balcony. And when Emma went to assess the situation, when she pulled on her pants and stepped to the door, one hand in a cautious fist, the doors flung open.

“What the--”

And like that, she was gone.

 

 

 

 

She’s in her old bed at the Mills estate. She would recognize this ceiling, the starchy smell of the blankets anywhere. After all, she knows this bunk by heart - to her left should be Mulan’s bed, their lockers against the other wall. If she goes out the door, she’ll be in the residence wing, and then to the training rooms, the laboratory, out to the track and the pool and the testing fields. 

She sits up, breathing hard. The room is empty. Mulan’s bed is made, her things no longer tucked familiarly under the mattress or next to the window.

_Why am I here?_

It only takes her a minute to remember the morning, waking up in Regina’s bed, the tapping at the window and the fade to black. She goes to the door, only to find it has been locked from the outside. She tries to break the door -- of _course_ it has been reinforced against super strength.

_Fuck._

She tries yelling, but gets no response. There is no sound from the other side of the door. She paces, waits, sends her body flying against the door, the walls, the window whose only view is the forest beyond. Nothing breaks beneath her. 

She sits on the edge of the bed, tries to stifle her frustration.

She waits.

 

 

 

 

And waits.

 

 

 

 

“Hello Emma.”

Emma opens her eyes. She is sitting on her bed, head back against the concrete wall. The window is dark. Night has fallen on the forest. There is no light in her room, only the grey haze from a sliver of moon. Cora Mills is sitting opposite her on the edge of Mulan’s bed. There is something metallic in her hand, though Emma can’t make it out yet. Cora is playing with it, shifting it quickly between her fingers.

Emma eyes the woman cautiously. “Why am I here?”

“For your protection, Emma.”

“Protection from what?”

“Well, you’re wanted for murder.”

Emma shakes her head. “That makes no--”

“See for yourself.” Cora reaches beside her, producing a tablet. On the tablet, the footage from a CCTV camera. A figure in Emma’s Savior suit is entering a cell in a prison where a man in orange sits, waits. He looks up at her, says something, and then his face changes. He’s yelling, covering his face. The Savior -- but it isn’t the Savior, because she is the Savior and this isn’t her, this cannot be her -- reaches down and pulls the man’s head quickly to the side. Emma draws in a quick breath as his head is pulled clean off his neck. The rest of his now bloody corpse slumps against the wall of his cell, and the figure makes quick work of ripping hands from wrists. Emma feels sick.

“That wasn’t me. I don’t know who that was, but...it wasn’t me.”

The figure has taken out a can of spraypaint. Emma tastes bile in her throat, starts to shake her head.

“No.”

The figure spraypaints a message. Emma shakes her head harder.

“No, _no_. This isn’t right.”

“Isn’t that your signature, Emma?” Cora’s voice is so calm, cleanly clipped and even toned. Something about it makes Emma nauseous. “Isn’t this you, entering the prison and decapitating the subject?”

“No,” Emma says, still shaking her head. “It wasn’t me.”

“The cameras don’t lie, darling. I don’t need to know why you did it. I will hide you here for as long as possible, with no explanation necessary.”

“But I didn’t--”

“You have no alibi, Emma. You have no witness to your whereabouts last night.”

“Last night?” It hits Emma, then. She looks Cora in the eye, her fingers twitching. For this, she wouldn’t do all _this_ just because...just because of that, would she?

“You were alone, Emma, or at least so far as we know. And then you went to the prison, and you committed a murder.”

“You want me to say it.”

Cora blinks, her mouth taut. “Say what, Emma?”

“I was with Regina last night. All night.”

Cora stares at Emma. She knew. She knows. And now she is punishing her for it. Cora gets to her feet, walking to the window.

“Emma, do you know what a liability is?”

Emma feels her hands forming fists, her defenses up. “Yes.”

“You are a liability, Emma. You are an asset, often my greatest asset, but you are also a liability.” Cora sighs. “I expected the best from you. I thought you would respect me and all that we’ve done for you. I thought that we would only need to have this conversation once.”

Emma remains still. She says nothing.

“You are also a weapon. And quite honestly, Emma, would you blame me if I need to know where my deadliest weapon is at all times? What would you have me to do when I discover that not only is she disobeying my orders, putting an entire contract at risk, threatening to expose my entire organization, but she’s betrayed me in the most _personal_ way?”

Emma shakes her head. “It’s not--”

“Nothing is more personal than family, Emma. I won’t mince words. My relationship with my daughter is...complex, to say the least.” Cora’s tone changes, suddenly betraying emotion. She spits out her remaining words. “But not so complex that her being _fucked_ by my most expensive asset is a situation worth overlooking. On the contrary, it is nearly impossible to ignore that kind of betrayal. Disgusting, really. Supers are meant to be superior to humans, Emma. We are meant to be above the basest drives and desires. There is something shameful in seeing a super behaving in such a way.”

Cora goes to the bedside table, and Emma finally sees that there is a tray there with a few medical instruments, a vial, a syringe. Cora goes to the work of filling they syringe, and Emma starts to get up, but Cora has lifted a single finger, and Emma’s entire body stiffens, freezes in place.

“No, Miss Swan. I’ll need you to stay still.”

“What is that?”

“It’s something I’m very proud of, actually.” Cora flicks the side of the syringe, examining at it in the moonlight. “My people have been working on this for the last year. It’s very special. So special, in fact, that it has been made for a single individual.”

Emma attempts to move again, but her teeth are clenched, her bones screaming. 

“Do you recall that I referred to you as a weapon, Emma?” Cora inserts the needle into Emma’s neck. “Consider this your safety.”

Emma doesn’t feel different, not at first. But when Cora releases her grip and Emma can move again, she feels her muscles contracting, her limbs giving way beneath her. “What...what is it doing?”

“You once asked me if I could take away your powers. You didn’t want to be a super, do you remember? It’s taken me a few years, darling, but I can finally grant your wish.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
